The Cyborg Watershed of the American West (with Lauren Bon and Grant Slater)
The ever-branching network of lakes, rivers, and streams that flow west from the Rockies enable human life to flourish in one of the hottest places on Earth. This is a “cyborg watershed” – part natur...
12 Aug 20251h 20min
The Death Knell of the Nation-State (with Rana Dasgupta and Jonathan Blake)
The modern nation-state wasn’t just a conglomeration of laws and armies. It was a belief in borders, in belonging, in the promise that citizenship could ground identity in a chaotic world. That belief...
5 Aug 20251h 23min
How We Discovered Our Own Extinction (with Thomas Moynihan and Benjamin Bratton)
For most of human history, the end of the world was a divine promise, inevitable and liberating for the holy alone. But the invention of extinction changed that. This was no prophecy. It was discovery...
29 Juli 202557min
The Rise of the Cyberocracy (with John Markoff and Grant Slater)
In the 21st century, Silicon Valley has coded into existence a vast memetic machinery — a self-replicating ecosystem of feedback loops, default settings, and algorithms now steering society at scale. ...
22 Juli 20251h 35min
Did the Sun Ever Set on the Age of Empire? (with Niall Ferguson and Nathan Gardels)
On America’s 250th birthday, historian Niall Ferguson suggests that the US has reached an age when most republics fizzle out. Donald Trump’s rise is merely a symptom of this late-stage unspooling of a...
15 Juli 202556min
What if Buddhists Ran the World? (with Stephen Batchelor and Bing Song)
Stephen Batchelor has spent decades stripping Buddhism of its dogma to find what wisdom it can offer the modern world. Could cities and countries run on karma instead of capital? In this episode, h...
8 Juli 20251h 17min
Letting Robots Know Where They Stand (with Fei-Fei Li and Dawn Nakagawa)
Before robots can act, they need to know where they are. That’s the deceptively simple premise behind the latest effort from machine vision pioneer Fei-Fei Li. She's building a Large World Model that...
1 Juli 202558min
Inhabiting Artificial Minds... On Mars and Beyond (with Vandi Verma and Claire Webb)
If we ever land on another planet, we won’t be the first to arrive. It will be our machines — the ones we’ve trained, calibrated, and loaded onto rockets – who will roam alien landscapes. In this e...
24 Juni 20251h 10min
